


Storm Surge

by standalone



Series: Fucking Political Bullshit exR Coffeeshop AU [17]
Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: M/M, amateur gardening?, more bjs, podcasts, sheltering in place / quarantine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-09
Updated: 2020-05-09
Packaged: 2021-03-03 04:20:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,693
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24098740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/standalone/pseuds/standalone
Summary: “I’m aimlessly angry, Grantaire, and what if that means I’m taking it out the wrong places?”
Relationships: Enjolras/Grantaire (Les Misérables)
Series: Fucking Political Bullshit exR Coffeeshop AU [17]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/610273
Comments: 15
Kudos: 63





	Storm Surge

“I’m under the dining table in a cave of blankets because this apparently swallows the echo, so you’re getting the clearest crispest version of this impassioned voice I can capture and transmit through whatever the hell channels podcasts travel down to get from me to you. 

“Because yeah, this is what’s tipped me over the edge, onto the bandwagon, and here I am, podcasting.

“Enough about podcasts. You know it’s a podcast; I know it’s a podcast. No goddamn reminders necessary.”

From the other side of the blanket tent—other side of the room—Enjolras’s voice is only vaguely muffled. Enjolras has never been soft-spoken, and it turns out quarantine ups his tendency toward the stentorian.

“I’m _here_ ,” he says, shifting into the urgent cadence Grantaire knows best from his speeches, which means it’s working, or at least it’s _going_ to work, this experiment in public speaking without a public, “to talk about government. No, more precisely, I’m here to talk about abnegation of responsibility in the face of disaster. I’m here to talk about shit-shows and downward plunges and the grasping hands of a hungry abyss.

“I’m _here_ to say this is fucked, yes. Yes. In the dark hot anonymity of this sub-table recording zone, I am coming at you with the hardest of truths: we are fucked.

“ _What about individual triumph, though?_ you’re asking. _Where’s the uplift? What about everyday heroes? I_ came _to this podcast for a much-needed validation of the unquenchable fucking human spirit!_

“Don’t worry. We’ll get there. But there’s an agenda. And first, at the top: things too awful to be — to _tol_ erate —fuck, I fucked that up.”

The faded bedspread flaps back so that Enjolras can poke his head out from under the table where he’s been trying to record. He blinks, recalibrating his place in the room.

“I fucked up, R.”

Grantaire, who has offered to work in another part of the apartment while Enjolras takes this first plunge into the dusty depths of podcasting, notes that the morning sun dulls the patchwork quilt but gleams in Enjolras’s hair. “This thing sounds like a hoot.”

“I was trying to say _tolerate_ , but I said _to be tolerated_ , and then—“

“Oh, I heard “

“Really?” Enjolras has lived in this place as long as Grantaire has. He cannot have missed the nearness of their table and couch. “And you keep working here like it’s nothing?”

“Your pillow fort doesn’t get me off, Enjolras.” Grantaire is working—at least nominally. There are emails to write and receipts to record and logistics to arrange. They’re open in half the active tabs on his computer. He can’t forget. However, isn’t it still work if he holds off on the drudgery of what _is_ so he can treat himself to some imagining about future shows that ought to be?

“But I’m yelling.” He almost looks legitimately confused about his housemate’s lack of boners. “About _justice_.”

“You’re in a nest under our only table. Keep it up. We’ll edit out the fuck-ups after.”

With a rustle of blankets, Enjolras disappears again.

“Okay, back to it then. Where was I? Oh. Awful things. Right. Top of the list, in no particular order: Capitalism. What the fuck are we still doing playing around with capitalism, like asshole kids who’ve got a bee on a string and are making it fly for their entertainment and who can’t for the life of them understand that the end-game is set. Someone’s going to get stung. Reopening our capitalist oligarchies will _never_ be the solution to the inequities that capitalism wreaks. And yet look at us human infants so ensorcelled by getting and spending that we cannot imagine literally any other solution. 

“Well, some of us.

“Some of us want to go to work. I get that; I like work. I like accomplishment. I like not being at home for every part of every day, even if I love everyone who’s here with me.

“Most people don’t want to _work_ though; they want to be at a _job_ , which is not necessarily the same thing. We want the things work brings in our fucked-up system: things like money and health care; things like stability. Which, just let me state this clearly, is absolutely no-holds-barred _fucked_ , that our expensive-ass behemoth of a country can’t lumber forward without holding its people in a state of constant, precarious dependence. This shit is unreasonable. It’s exploitative. And it’s why things are so much worse here than almost anywhere else—because when shit gets horrifying, when we have a goddamn _pandemic_ on our hands, our first national instinct isn’t to say ‘how do we fix this?’ but instead, ‘who are we still better than?’ Or maybe ‘who can we blame?’”

Plague art is gonna be too hot, when museums reopen. Curators across the world are pulling together shows that highlight creativity amid public despair. So R’s not going to pitch that.

R’s going to pitch renewal. 

Not the renewal after a disaster, even. Just growth. Just—things growing. Things working. Things making the world nicer than it used to be.

We’re not there yet, of course. However, a show doesn’t plan itself overnight, and so far, this show is no more than a few greenish wisps curling through his mind; if he gets started now, he might have something solid ready by the time the museum reopens.

“Okay, now it’s Culture Time! So I’ve been reading some, but focus turns out to be hard for a person like me. Turns out I thrive on distraction, or something like that. But poems. Did you know? Poems are sometimes actually great. Like [this one](https://poets.org/poem/spray-water-tanka-hot-water), this one I keep reading to the person I live with, who says it’s about me.”

Grantaire does an excellent job not laughing aloud as Enjolras reads it out. Enjolras reads poems like someone who doesn’t believe in poems, like he barely believes they exist, let alone mean something. He hits each word too hard. Poems don’t want to fit his speechmaker’s cadences. _Every word’s supposed to matter_ , he argues in defense of his snare-drum delivery. _There’s so few of them._

 _There’s only two of us in this house_ , Grantaire pointed out. _Does that mean we should both yell all the time?_

Except Enjolras’s answer to that was already boomingly obvious from every inch of their little flat.

“But he’s wrong, you know. It’s not about me. That’s the point, as I read it. Not me, but maybe everyone? Stuck, always, in the briar-patches of our worst moments. So that decades later we still remember things used to be shitty for us.

“I’m gonna put some transition here. No, that’s foolish; I absolutely do not have the patience to fiddle around with sound effects. I’ll just announce it? End. Of. Poetry!”

“And back to the list! Next up: things I’m worried about. I’m worried, we’ll, it’s like in that poem, actually. _Back to the poem!_ What’s going to happen for the people living their formative years right now, here in quarantine? What if they grow up mad forever, even when they’ve gotten to go back to the full-boil life we used to know, that they were cold once? How do these months shape and define us? How do we, in our separate homes—if we’re lucky enough to have them—adjust the inconsistent dial of public sentiment?”

“‘The resentment of colder water.’ How do we keep these people who are just looking for ways to be aggrieved from feeling that this disease, this pandemic, is a personal attack on _them_ —on their freedoms, on their liberties? How do we forestall a backlash?”

“There is so much good shit going on out in the world. Workers organizing. People taking care of their vulnerable neighbors. Strangers being nice to strangers. But for some reason I am not going to dignify with much attention at all, I promise this, we all keep seeing the stories about assholes. When you see assholes all day every day, everyone starts to look like assholes. And we’re not.”

It doesn’t help that most of us are out of our element and that even as we try to do the least damage possible, we’re lumbering through this pandemic like elephants in a corn maze, learning limitations only by trampling them flat. In that light, it’s actually kind of remarkable that more of us aren’t shittier.

R is frankly amazed that he and Enjolras have managed, for the most part, to treat each other graciously thus far throughout their socially proximal upheaval.

Fortunately, he loves Enjolras’s rants—but when you share an apartment with someone for all hours of all days, and especially someone who likes to work their ideas out at top volume, sometimes you wish they would take the yelling to another room for a little bit. An hour into Enjolras’s blistering commentary on the Majority Leader’s decision to reconvene the Senate—”While DC’s curve is still rising! It’s ludicrous, does he want everyone to fucking _die_? Does he somehow think the disease is going to spare his people, like a fucking _biblical plague_?”—Grantaire first proposed that Enj take up podcasting.

But now that Enjolras is yelling at a computer, under the table—that part, informed perhaps by some research and a quixotic whimsy upon which Grantaire will not shit, was his idea—a vaguely-tailored rant that seems intended for broader audiences, R’s not actually in a hurry to get out of earshot.

“Which brings us to our FUN INTERLUDE! About humans being humane. And what a lead-in, honestly, A+ rhetoric, because when we think of _humane_ , what do we think of? We think of animals without homes. And you know what?

“The shelters are empty. This is great, because you know what it means? It means human beings are recognizing that we need companionship. We need something else to care about, and, I guess ideally, something to care about us back.

“Many of us are lucky to have with us through this strange time partners or family or other people we love. Even those of us who do might crave the diversity of society, the persistent affection, that a pet can offer. So, I don’t doubt that we can all agree that in such a time, reminded as we are of our human frailty, of the impermanence of life, and of the vital importance of compassion and companionship—”

 _Where is he going with this?_ , Grantaire has been wondering, but now he’s pretty sure he knows. He considers leaving the room.

“We can agree that if there was, in this world, some animal that a person could easily help by bringing it into their home, and they chose not to, that person would be, well, if not a _monster_ , at least in possession of some monstrous tendencies.”

Oh shit. Grantaire is going to have to own this.

He runs a hand through his hair. It’s getting too long. He should ask Enjolras for a cut—although that’ll probably end up with Enjolras hovering over him for an hour, making a few haphazard snips, then finally watching in relief while Grantaire finishes the job himself. 

“See, there’s a dog outside that comes sniffing around the dumpsters in the night, and my beloved life partner and housemate says we can’t capture it and adopt it. It’s obviously got nowhere else to go, and now, now of all times—”

“Not a dog,” R mutters, looking up from an index of the Calder Foundation’s traveling collection. 

“And he refuses! We hear it knocking around down there getting scraps, and he won’t even let us consider it.”

“It’s not a dog!” he calls out loud. They both know this, right? And yet, Enjolras’s insistence on calling it a dog now feels firmly enough the stuff of fantasy that R has been loath to put too fine a point on the matter. Especially since the second Enjolras brought it up, Combeferre squashed the notion. R figures that his role in this charade is to indulge Enjolras a little. Let him have his romance. 

“It’s got a stripey tail, and pointy ears, and I’m pretty sure if _someone would let me_ just set out a little trap—”

Unless that romance makes him out to be a villain.

“It’s a _raccoon_!” he says now. Snorting, he stands, unplugging his laptop as he goes. “WE ARE NOT ADOPTING A FUCKING TRASH RACCOON.”

“I’m sorry, I think there’s some _BACKGROUND NOISE_ that may be getting through,”

“When you get rabies, don’t come crying to me!” R heads to the bedroom.

*

There’s a little balcony off their bedroom, just a couple yards of fresh air and greenery and sunlight, but it’s a hell of a lot better than none. R kicks back in one of the chairs, feet up on the balcony rail, and contemplates movements of regeneration. 

He keeps spiraling back to art of place—Goldsworthy, Lin, Calder, Serra. Constrained in space as we are now, everyone is also everywhere. He and Enjolras both spend their workdays on calls in which the people half a world and half a block away are equally near, and equally distant.

Rahwa’s leading the charge to digitize the museum’s galleries—a new room each week, with high-resolution images and videos and expert commentary from the curators and historians who first pulled it all together.

The internet means everything is everywhere, but he’s here, and even as he keeps scrolling through schematics for massive mobiles, accompanied by photos of the final works, he is unmoved, unawed. He knows the ethereal rightness of these arcing metal rods, smooth as wires, swaying in calm collaboration with the pull of gravity. He knows enough to know that there’s no replacement for _place_.

He wants to transform place. He wants to create a show that is here, only here, in his museum—that could not exist anywhere else, that cannot even pretend. 

A show that is a feeling, and that feeling is _belonging_.

Like being here, really, because there’s nowhere else like it, on their little balcony with sun on his bare feet and the smells of flowers and a lingering hint of skunk, and inside, Enjolras full-on yelling now because he’s thinking about the senator going back to work and while he would vomit at the disloyalty of confessing such doubts, Enjolras is more afraid of the senator’s mortality than of his own.

“The trap of exceptionalism,” he hears, howled— _everyone_ hears— “is that you convince yourself _exceptional_ means _best_ , even when what you’re the exception to is having an actual realistic, science-backed plan for protecting millions of people from disease!”

Place demands time. This place, in this time, is ours.

*

After the shouting has died down, R meanders through to investigate. 

The pillow fort does not get him off, it’s true. Sweaty Enjolras, though, flopped on the floor after, hot and elated from a good yell, absolutely does. 

Enjolras rolls over. “It’s unusable,” he says. 

“Maybe.”

“Mostly profane, and almost entirely in the red zone of the decibel meter. I kept forgetting to look.”

“Jehan’s got some tricks up his sleeve. Let him mess with it a little, and you might get an audience out of the deal.”

“I’m aimlessly angry, Grantaire, and what if that means I’m taking it out the wrong places?”

“You’re not.”

“But I could be. We’re frozen in place and it makes me furious, and it shouldn’t, it’s the right thing to do, we are being _the best people we can be,_ but...”

“But we can’t out- _good_ a fucked government.”

“You knew I wasn’t going to be able to unfuck it.”

“Unfuck my heaaarrrt,” Grantaire croons, reaching a hand to drag Enjolras up from the floor. Assholes are going to be assholes. Aren’t we all looking for reasons to be mad? And if so, shouldn’t our choices about where we put that anger matter?

Enjolras presses into him. Grantaire’s quarantine beard, while not an absolute hit with its owner since it basically transforms him into his own father, really does something for Enj, who has displayed a particular interest in kissing lately. This part, Grantaire doesn’t mind.

There’s a taste and smell to Enjolras, often masked by his soap and shaving lotion and detergent, but it comes out during sex or exercise or after a long night’s sleep, in the warm quiet of their shared bed. Grantaire relishes this taste that’s almost a smell, this smell he can taste. Seeking more, his tongue edges into Enjolras’s mouth. 

Enjolras is, incongruously, fully dressed in work pants and a close-fitting button-down, both of which are rumpled from their time under the table. He’s grinding into Grantaire, and at the feel of that cock nudging against his through their chinos and jeans, R grinds back.

No one can see in their window, and of course no visitors are coming by, but it’s still delightfully unnerving when Enjolras’s hand slips into his pants and starts stroking.

“Can I blow you?” Enjolras asks, when he finally pulls back enough for breath. He’s already sinking toward the floor. His hair’s a sweaty, tangled mess, and his face is triply flushed, from the heat and the fervor and the making out.

Grantaire’s empty hand finds the back of Enjolras’s head and pulls him in. 

This mouth, this brilliant, eloquent mouth, opens for his cock, and Grantaire lets himself clunk backward against the wall. Let the apartment hold him up. Let Enjolras get him off. Let this part of this be good. A gift from the universe is a gift. Take it.

Enjolras has one hand on Grantaire’s balls and the other in his own pants; this much is clear from the grunts Enj is making and the increasing incoherence and eagerness of his mouth’s movements around R’s cock. 

“You’re gonna come with me,” R says, and the resulting moan just about tips him over. “You’re amazing, and I am nuts for you, and I could spend every goddamn minute fucking you, for real, but god, I’m gonna—” Enjolras pulls back, almost off his cock, and his hand clenches in Enjolras’s hair to drag him back. “I’m gonna— Fuck.” 

Enjolras takes him all the way; his cock is pressing the soft flesh at the back of his throat, which pulses around the head. From the low keening that fills his ears, he knows Enjolras is coming around him. “Oh my fucking god. Fuck.” 

With a convulsive series of thrusts, through which he holds Enjolras close, he comes right down Enjolras’s throat.

After a minute, Enjolras pulls off and licks his lip, winking up at Grantaire as he does so. He tugs R’s pants back up, then his own, and is about to stand when he realizes that R’s left hand has been holding something this whole time.

“Are those _roses_?”

Even if Grantaire had the breath to say so, this doesn’t deserve an answer. Enjolras has been alive long enough to recognize roses. 

“From—what? Are you growing—growing _roses_ on our balcony?”

“ _Your best friend_ gave us those plants.”

“Those were little, like, sticks in a bucket.”

“They have grown.” It’s an understatement. Both ends of their balcony burst with blooms, a heavy graceful heap of them that curves up over the railings and drapes down the sides, crinkly enormous red-and-white showstoppers and white profusions like gold-lined clouds. On warm days like this, when they leave the windows open, every breeze through their apartment brings with it their soft living smell. 

Heading to the kitchen to wash up, Enjolras asks, “You’ve been growing those things for _two years_?”

“Get me some water to put them in.” While Enjolras is running the water, Grantaire can’t not observe, “You haven’t noticed the flowers growing literally outside your window, but you remember how long we’ve lived together.”

“Because you’re important to me,” he says, like this is a reason.

“And you’re important to me, but I also notice the physical world through which we move.” Taking the offered jar, he sets the snipped roses in one at a time, pinching off a few low leaves as he goes.

Enjolras goes to look. “I guess I thought maybe they’d just always been there,” he reports out when he returns.

How odd that we can share the same walls and floor, the same furniture, the same accoutrements, and still see them so differently.

Grantaire opens a beer. He’d offer one to Enjolras, too, except he knows he’s got work to do for the senator. 

“How’s it feel, for a break in the speech-writing and press-releasing? It must be kind of cathartic to go extemporaneous.” 

“Well, ‘extemporaneous,’” he says, leaning out of the fridge for the air-quotes. “It’s not like I didn’t have a plan.”

He usually does.

“I covered everything I wanted to: protests, misdirected rage, a cultural interlude.” He pulls slices of bread out of the bag, tosses them on plates, and then hesitates. He turns one over, then another other. He moves one. “You’re right. Culture is important.”

“Gravitas, et cetera.”

“Something we can read into without it breaking us.” He’s back in the refrigerator, rummaging through the vegetable drawers.

“Lettuce is in the top one.”

“Where are the—”

“Out of cucumbers. We should start a list.”

Piling ingredients on the counter, Enjolras returns to his podcast contents. “Got in some illustrative anecdotes to establish my persona.”

“A real charmer.”

“I needed something cute for the burnt-out.” He’s frowning theatrically at the bread.

“What are you gonna call it?”

“The podcast?” With a flourish, he flips the rightmost slice again.

“Yeah. ‘Under the Table’? ‘Blanket Statements’?”

Enjolras stops turning over the bread and nods at it. Two pairs. Mirror symmetry. 

“Yelling About Justice?” Grantaire offers.

From the kitchen window, where he’s set the cut roses, you can see a few of their kindred blooming outside.

“How about ‘Here’s Why I’m Mad About the Reasons You’re Mad’?”

“I think I’ve turned you funny,” Grantaire says.

“Oh for sure, babe,” Enjolras says, opening the jar of mustard that R likes best. “This is all your doing. So now you have to live with it.”

And thank god for that. 


End file.
